Recently, I eatched traffic at a T-junction in Hyderabad while smoking outside on the stairs. The picture below was very early in the morning when there was little traffic. After 8 AM or so, the atreets were full of cars on all the three sides. The partition on the left only made it to some extent two way traffic on both sides and there were also U-turns. There were no traffic lights or traffic cops but I did not see any accidents during the week I watched. I wondered whether there is some self organizing mechanism at work. Ed Yong has a popular artcle on such phenomena, and I am sure that there are many books and articles studying various aspects of swarms and applications.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Interesting discussion on argument in 3quarksdaily. Behind all this, I think, is a basic disease of humans: trying to understand complex things where neat formulations may not be possible. It gets even worse in physics concepts which go beyond everyday experience. Nevertheless worth looking at.http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/09/arguing-about-argument.html#moreI am suspicious of that vision thing from big minds. From the ever interesting Chapati Mystery Facebook http://fadesingh.tumblr.com/post/55849407168/the-strange-friendship-of-indira-gandhi-and-buckminster
Rajiv Sethi on Information, Trading and Beliefs "If there's a message in all this, it is that markets aggregate not just information, but also fundamentally irreconcilable perspectives. Prices, as John Kay puts it, "are the product of a clash between competing narratives about the world." Some of the volatility that one observes in asset markets arises from changes in perspectives, which can happen independently of the arrival of information. This is why substantial "corrections" can occur even in the absence of significant news, and why stock prices appear to "move too much to be justified by subsequent changes in dividends." What makes markets appear invincible is not the perfect aggregation of information that is sometimes attributed to them, but the sheer unpredictability of persuasion, exhortation, and social influence that can give rise to major shifts in the distribution of narratives. "http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/23/orwell-nsa-surveillance-alan-rusbridger "The potential of the surveillance state goes way beyond anything inGeorge Orwell's 1984, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor-in-chief, told an audience in New York on Monday."The Logic Behind Assad's use of Chemical Weapons (via Naked Capitalism) "Using chemical weapons didn’t help Assad make gains on the battlefield. It didn’t signal to Syrians that he was willing to use these weapons — he’d already proved that he was willing to use them. What it did do was provide hard evidence that the United States was not coming to the defense of Syrian civilians under any conditions, and that the US would allow Assad to continue to fight to remain in power. Both of these signals would have the effect of undercutting support for the opposition."

Sunday, September 22, 2013

This seems right to me. Yves Smith comment on Obama responding to Krugman:The Crazy Party Paul Krugman. True only up to a point. First, crazy is a very good strategy. Kissinger promoted the idea of Nixon as crazy (before Watergate really did make him paranoid) to improve US bargaining leverage. What is more scary than a rabid crazy anti Commie with nukes? Second, when Obama had more power (as in was less lame-ducky) he used Republican craziness as his air cover for doing what he wanted to do. That rewarded and encouraged super extreme behavior.Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/09/links-92113.html#ZcAbe70u0Feu3JXz.99

mainly in USA "Why does so much of the academic writing on international affairs seem to be of little practical value, mired in a "cult of irrelevance"? Is it because IR scholars are pursuing a misleading model of "science," patterned after physics, chemistry, or biology? Or is it because many prominent academics fear criticism and are deathly afraid of being controversial, and prefer to hide behind arcane vocabulary, abstruse mathematics, or incomprehensible postmodern jargon?

Thursday, September 19, 2013

One an old review of Landes book 'The Wealth and Poverty of Nations' byJoel Moykr and a recent article, in part a review from N+1 Slave Capitaliosm (via Chapati Mystery Facebook). The concluding paragraph frpm the second "The enlightening, progressive force of liberalism has carried us far from slavery, we like to think. We are not those people and never could have been. In River of Dark Dreams, we are reminded that between the slave empire and our own age lies only a handful of generations. Johnson shows the historical meaning of this proximity. We are connected not just through the shortness of time but through the persistence of the liberal capitalist tradition itself. The form of freedom fantasized by the slaveholding South, in turn, is the freedom of our own society: ensuring a standard of living sufficient to confirm our self-image and limit domestic conflict; built upon ecological degradation, the conquest of darker nations by international bureaucracies, their enslavement by debt, their forcible integration into a global commercial network; enforced by our own armies of the night, surveilling, killing, torturing without oversight. The myth of our great distance from slavery—of the old South’s fundamental illiberalism—exists precisely to give us a way of managing our experience of this continuity, and to let us continue to enact it."